ИСТИНА

One of the critical features of Arctic tourism lies in understanding of its boundaries. Russian official documents use the concept of the Arctic zone. From the physical and geographical point, they do not correspondent to the geographical zones. For example, the northern regions of Arkhangelsk and Republic of Karelia, included in the Arctic zone of the Russian Federation (AZRF), are not Arctic. They do not go beyond the taiga zone and are located outside the permafrost. Magadan Region or Koryaksky District, on the contrary, although not included in the Arctic zone of Russian Federation, thus their main areas are occupied by subarctic loaches, cedar flanked thickets, and coastal tundra. It is proposed to include in the Arctic those administrative units which territories lie wholly or mostly to north from the forest boundary within the forest-tundra, tundra and cold deserts. The resident population in the Russian Arctic is 2.6 million. In the world in Arctic and subarctic regions from nothern boundary of continuous forests 4.3 million people lived in 2017. 2.2 million of them live in the foreign Arctic and about 2.1 million people in the Russian Arctic. The number of permanent residents is compared with the number of tourists visiting the regions. The number of tourists who visit the Arctic (within the boundaries of the Arctic Circle), annually increase on 1 million people. In the early 1990s it was about 5 million, in the 2010s the number has reached 10.2 million people. The number of tourists in the Arctic almost 2.5 times more than the number of permanent residents. At the same time, the number of tourists in the European Arctic is almost 6 times higher than the number of permanent Arctic residents. The number of Arctic tourists in Russia is 530 thousands in year, from this number more than half are the visitors of the Murmansk region. In this case, the number of tourists in the Russian Arctic, which occupyes half of the artic area, is in 14 times lesser than the number of tourists in the rest of the Arctic. The number of tourists in AZRF is 738 thousand people per year. It is proved that tourism has become the main factor of human presence in the Arctic. For some administrative regions of thye Arctic, the excess of the number of tourists over the local population can exceeded in 10 times. Tourism changes the Arctic development ideology from one with categories of risk to the axiological with categories of beauty. Key words: tourism, Arctic, population, development, periglacial environments, political and administrative borders.